I love rhyme, but I’ve never been a fan of hip-hop music, which rhymes flamboyantly.

So I guess I’m one of those people David Caplan is addressing in
Rhyme’s Challenge (Oxford, 192 pages, $19.95), a call to recognize the artistry in the
lyrics of Jay Z, Eminem and others.

“I propose we open our ears and rediscover an amazing rhyming culture,” writes Caplan, an
English professor at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware.

My ears might continue to resist, but I will say he has opened my eyes to a few things.

He notes that hip-hop artists don’t care that literary critics in academia consider rhyme a low
form of poetic expression. Come to think of it, neither do I. Why should such exuberant — and
often-difficult — wordplay disqualify a writer from being taken seriously?

“Hip-hop performers increasingly favor the particular kinds of rhymes that the most prestigious
forms of modern and contemporary poetry generally avoid, associating them with unskilled or comic
verse,” he writes. “A single quatrain by Eminem features more examples of identical,
multi-syllabic, forced and mosaic rhyme than an entire volume of the
Best American Poetry anthology.”

I can identify with the verbal ebullience. Who wants to play on the stuffy team?

When Kanye West paired
Sunday with
Hyundai on
Gold Digger (about a pro football player with a greedy girlfriend), he didn’t choose the
car brand just for rhyming convenience, Caplan writes. To play on Sunday is to reach the pinnacle
of football success; to drive off in a Hyundai because your woman has your money is to be
humiliated.

I can’t quote most of the other lyrics he offers as examples of virtuosity for obvious reasons:
Hip-hop is notoriously full of vulgarity, not to mention violence, misogyny and homophobia.

Caplan, who began listening to hip-hop as a teenager (Grandmaster Flash was the first rapper to
catch his attention), says he isn’t endorsing the objectionable views of some performers.

“What I admire is their verbal artistry.”

He considers Eminem and Jay Z among the best of the rhymers, but many hip-hop artists are eager
to claim the title of poet. They defend their lyrics on websites; write books about them; and brag
in their songs about how adept they are at fearless, inventive rhyming.